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| Thursday, August 04, 2005 |
| So much for an increase in posts come summer |
I thought that with my girly-q's gone, and without school work looming every evening, I would be posting like MAD all summer. Not so much, as it turns out.
At the beginning of the summer (May), I turned down the opportunity to spend the summer as a research assistant working on enhancing a curriculum for the 1st-year class that I'll be a teaching facilitator for in the fall. The girls were winding down their school year, we had a lot going on family-wise before they left for their dad's - including trips planned, weekend activities to enjoy, etc. But I told my professor at the time that come July, I'd be available to help out with any isolated overflow assignments that may crop up.
Come July, I emailed her, and reminded her of my availability. She emailed me back immediately and said that b/c of a few unfortunate circumstances, they needed a LOT of help, and could I come to the meeting that night?
So I've been working on this project as a research assistant. I've really loved it. We are using welfare issues to illustrate certain points, and I am immersed in research on welfare reform and the media's imaging of welfare recipients. I've also been doing some research trying to provide the real voices of welfare recipients.
When I was married, and my ex-husband was working toward his Ph.D., I had a baby. My first was born one month after my ex started his Ph.D. program. We lived in Berkeley, CA, where rents were super high (coming from Alabama, where our rent was $400/mo, the CA rents seemed REALLY SUPER DUPER HIGH). I had an itty bitty baby, and I didn't want to work full time. My years as a legal assistant/secretary/paralegal made me quite employable, however, and I decided to make a go at a home business. [I bet you thought I was going to say that I went on welfare! ha!]
Surprisingly, it worked. I was able to network in 2 different directions - I did a lot of work for arbitrators, and a lot of work for academics. The academic work paid less, but was so very interesting. I transcribed interviews that were collected as field research. I transcribed interviews with sex workers (one of those interviews was 20 hours long!), interviews with random women at BART stations over whether or not they get offended when men whistle at them, and about 500 interviews with the urban poor of the Oakland area. One was a project pertaining specifically to the recently-implemented Welfare to Work in California, and one was more generally about underprivileged unmarried parents - the target group consisted of probably 90% welfare recipients.
That last one .... it was 100% life-changing. Did I mention on this blog in the past that I attended a SUPER DUPER conservative college? As in, a college run by none other than Jerry Falwell? I did. At that college, we were taught from the pulpit, by Jerry Falwell and others, that welfare recipients are lying cheats who keep having illegitimate babies in order to get bigger checks, which they use to buy fancy cars and drugs. I believed it. I was a snotty, cocky, Republican bitch back then (not saying all Republicans are those things ... I know many Republicans who are NOT those things. However, when *I* was a Republican, I was that kind), and I truly believed that people had no reason to not just get a job, and that they didn't deserve my money just b/c they were lazy, and that they were sinful liars. I don't know what the hell I was thinking ... I didn't *have* any money! I was a college student!!
These interviews, however, which I had piped directly into my ears for HUNDREDS of hours, were not with lazy people who kept having babies to get bigger welfare checks. The interviews were with people who were struggling to feed their families. People whose education level was woefully low, whose families were very important to them. Some (20%) were with people who had addiction issues ... but that even meant something completely different than what I previously had thought. It only gave them more of a disadvantage, more struggles. It didn't mean they were cheats.
I was already going through a major ideological change in my life ... having left the bubble of the religious university, both my husband-at-the-time and I went through earth shattering revelations about the community we had been a part of. About the things we had been told. About the shallowness of most of it. I also had a very close friend of mine from college come out of the closet, and many many things were shaken up for me with that. (Jerry Falwell does teach children to hate gay people, in case people thought that was just an exaggeration, it's not).
And these interviews really really contributed to all these changes. They put a huge amount of empathy inside of me. I think that after that experience, I am constantly vigilant against any tendency to make assumptions about people, or about their choices and decisions and mistakes. I am constantly thinking about all of the possible hardships that people may have had to live through or live with that could put them where they are. I have heard so many examples of hardships that I never previously would have imagined, coming out of my suburban, privileged, homogenous background. I think that the changes mostly arise from the fact that I made these hugely erroneous conclusions and assumptions about entire groups of people without the proper information. I hated realizing that about myself. Hated it.
Now I'm working on this research assignment regarding welfare reform and the imaging of welfare recipients, and I am in heaven. I am so glad that I have this opportunity. Oddly, I have come across cites to an article which came out of my favorite project. I dropped the then-student/now-professor who I worked for a line, and let her know I had seen the article, and what led me to it.
But that's why I haven't had time to post so much this summer. God, my stories get long. |
posted by Zuska @ 12:16 PM   |
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| 1 Comments: |
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Wow, welfare mama issues are close to my heart. I got through undergrad as a welfare mama prior to welfare reform. When I graduated, they were just starting to cut off benefits for full time students. I connected with the Welfare Warriors (Milwaukie Wisconsin) during undergrad too--their newspaper is/was fabulous.
It really seems strange that we villify welfare mamas, I mean, any other stay at home mom wouldn't have these negative assumptions re: laziness, re: motivation for having children.
I'm a white mama--society seems to have this stereo type of the African American welfare mama with a gaggle of babes. Personally, in the midwest, the majority of the ladies I waited with at the currency exchange (back when foodstamps were actual stamps) were white mamas.
I lost a tooth because of my "welfare dentist" and his standard of care (back when welfare mamas in Illinois actually had minimal dental coverage)--I've thought about replacing it with some fake crown, but part of me feels that it is an unmistakeable sign of where I've come from, what I've lived through. If I replaced it with fakery, I might forget.
I could go on and on with my former welfare mama anger. All I can say is have fun with that research assignment.
--Lynn
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Wow, welfare mama issues are close to my heart. I got through undergrad as a welfare mama prior to welfare reform. When I graduated, they were just starting to cut off benefits for full time students. I connected with the Welfare Warriors (Milwaukie Wisconsin) during undergrad too--their newspaper is/was fabulous.
It really seems strange that we villify welfare mamas, I mean, any other stay at home mom wouldn't have these negative assumptions re: laziness, re: motivation for having children.
I'm a white mama--society seems to have this stereo type of the African American welfare mama with a gaggle of babes. Personally, in the midwest, the majority of the ladies I waited with at the currency exchange (back when foodstamps were actual stamps) were white mamas.
I lost a tooth because of my "welfare dentist" and his standard of care (back when welfare mamas in Illinois actually had minimal dental coverage)--I've thought about replacing it with some fake crown, but part of me feels that it is an unmistakeable sign of where I've come from, what I've lived through. If I replaced it with fakery, I might forget.
I could go on and on with my former welfare mama anger. All I can say is have fun with that research assignment.
--Lynn